Management is a practical, day-to-day activity

The business section in bookshops is full of self-help, inspirational management books, showing you how to create a vision, take a ‘helicopter’ view and ‘strategise.’ But meanwhile back on the planet Earth (to quote Woody Allen) real management is a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour activity and it’s hard. I have never

What an interesting question! And, paradoxically, an issue our own Skilful.co team had been wrestling with as we created our new ‘Introduction to Teams’ course. Harmony is great, it means everyone supports each other, gets along and enjoys working with each other. However it can lead to over-politeness and an

We’re pleased to announce that the ‘Difficult Conversations’ course is now live on Skilful.co and available to all members from today. We’ve spoken with lots of managers and business owners about the ‘pinch points’ in having all the different types of difficult conversations and that’s why we’ve created this course for Skilful.co. As managers our

In her book ‘Immersive Learning’ Koreen Pagano suggests that game designers understand motivation and cognitive science better than trainers do. The reason is that with games there is immediate feedback and gamers also have an opportunity to try things out and even fail in a safe environment. The problem is

About a month back there was a great TED talk by Tony Fadell about how he approaches design. He’s one of the people who worked on the original iPod, and more lately he’s well known for creating the Nest smart thermostat. In the talk he explains how we follow the

I remember seeing an interview a while back with Orson Welles, where he talks about configuring the lighting on set for a movie. Having worked for years in the theatre, where he was used to designing and setting up the lighting, he assumed that the same would be true for

We’ve recently been working on new ways to make our courses more immersive so managers can practice different situations online in a safe and friendly environment. We’ve already added an Interactive Conversation tool to simulate one-on-one chats with colleagues. These allow you to try different approaches and get feedback on

We’re filming the ‘Difficult Conversations’ course at the moment and I was asked about open questions. Asking an open question can open up a dialogue, move things along and allow you to understand at a deeper level. We can see the difference between open and closed questions here: One of

So many people think you need to be charismatic, inspiring, and full of energy to be a great leader – but what if that doesn’t play to your personality? Here are some thoughts and tips of how to give a presentation that play to your own strengths.

We’ve just recorded our ‘introduction to teams’ course and someone asked that apparently simple question. And the answers ranged from “of course” to “of course not!” So what’s the definitive answer? Sadly it’s “yes…but!” Simply because it depends on the team and their stage of development. If there’s no leadership